Douglas Kellner

Douglas Kellner, Distinguished Research Professor of Education at UCLA and an early theorist in the field of media literacy, discusses the current state of media today and the need for consumers of news media to think critically and to question everything they intake. Critiquing major media’s non-stop coverage of the death and funeral of Queen Elizabeth II in recent weeks, Kellner analyses media's capitalist project where objective reporting of current events is rare because entertainment ultimately sells. Giving a brief history of television and cable news along with his consumption of print news from his time as a paperboy, Kellner elaborates how the age of the internet fails to offer the paradigm shift that many progressives hoped it would thirty years ago. He observes how corporate media dominates political and social discourse while raking in large sums by leaping from one spectacle to the next within strict partisan lines. From stories of “extreme weather,” the OJ Simpson trial, wars, sex scandals, Donald Trump, celebrity gossip, and the British monarchy, Kellner notes how media proliferates within the ethos of what Guy Debord called the “society of spectacle.”